The American Press: The Unbearable Lightness of Treason
by Takuan Seiyo
This is the WaPo front page, June 2, 2009. Center right, you will find this story:
Killing Reignites Abortion Debate — Fatal shooting of prominent later-term abortion provider raises fears on both sides of the issue.
This is the NY Times front page, June 2, 2009. Center right, you will find this story:
Seeking Clues on Suspect in Shooting of Doctor
This is the LA Times front page, June 2, 2009. Bottom left, you will find this:
Suspect in Kansas abortion doctor’s slaying reportedly belonged to anti-government militia
This is The Chicago Tribune front page, June 2, 2009. Center right, you will find this story:
Tiller slaying suspect linked to militias
This is the Dallas Morning News front page, June 2, 2009. Bottom left, you will find this story:
Abortion doctor shot, killed at Kansas church
This is the front page of the Arizona Daily Star, on June 2, 2009. In the column “AP Breaking News” you’ll find:
Defendant in doc’s killing railed against abortion
In the column “Most Commented Stories for June 1, 2009” you will find:
Kansas abortion doctor is fatally shot in church — 267 Comments
What’s wrong with this coverage? Only this:
On Monday, June 1, one day after the abortionist’s shooting and a day before the editions quoted above, a black American Muslim convert, Carlos Bledsoe, aka Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad, 24, pulled up in his car at 10:30 a.m. in front of an Army-Navy recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas. Muhammad opened fire at the military personnel there. He killed one soldier, William Long, 24, and wounded another, Quinton Ezeagwula, 18.
Per USA Today, Little Rock Police Lt. Terry Hastings said in a phone interview, “This individual appears to have been upset with the military, the Army in particular, and that’s why he did what he did.”
A short time later Muhammad’s car was stopped on the freeway and he was arrested. An assault rifle and other weapons were found in his car. Here is Muhammad, being taken away:
- - - - - - - - -
You will not find a mention of any of this on the front pages of America’s newspapers, if any mention at all. It’s not newsworthy, is it?
Who are these people? No, I don’t mean the respective killers. I mean the editors of America’s newspapers who trumpet the killing of a late-term abortionist who made a living at crushing and dismembering little humans, and deign not to notice an American jihadi, a convert to the Religion of Peace, who murders American soldiers in a shopping center in Arkansas in broad daylight.
Who are they? Do they get their marching orders from the same pasha in Washington so that they all make the same editorial choices? Or was the same chip implanted in their contemptible skulls sometime during college?
27 comments:
Western media are enemy number one, make no mistake about it.
Thank you to Takuan Seiyo for the post. I love your writing, and I agree with your basic conclusion: We are heading for a huge crash in the entire Western world. It's coming and it cannot be stopped. Not anymore. Our job is to survive the crash and preserve something which our descendants can use to build the third generation of European civilization.
yes, the degree of mindrot that a people has to have suffered for this sort of thing to become prevalent is frightening.
it speaks volumes as to the momentum already established in the direction of the wall that takuan writes of, which is, i think, roughly analagous to the discontinuity that i talk about.
There is no doubt that many in the MSM are traitors. But what is to be said of the Republican party that refuses to say this publically and call for these people to be charged with treason.
As much as many conservatives support the GOP, they are just as much a part of the problem as Obama, the Media, the left etc.
A story like this should have true conservative politicians demanding treason charges to be laid against the journalists and their editors conducting this war against our country and culture.
Conservatives are trying to be nice and polite and present facts in a decent manner - while we are dealing with lying traitors who will say and do anything to take this country to hell
This country desperately needs a conservative political movement to save it.
The pasha who makes the determination of which stories lead is in New York, not Washington.
I learned this 15-18 years ago. I attended a meeting in Washington at which many conservatives were speaking. The initial AP reports that evening were even handed. The next morning, the AP reports were full of ridicule of the speakers at the meeting. The editors or the night-trolls got to the stories and "fixed" them.
Speaking of bias, I'm getting seriously tired of this "white guilt" thing. I see over at Larry Auster's place an Asian man claiming that whites have "no right" to be in North America. Let's take that logic seriously. Southeast Asia was settled in early historical times by people from southern China, who displaced and dispossessed the original, dark-skinned inhabitants of the region. The latter now only survive in tiny pockets in the Philippines and elsewhere. So why is there no yellow guilt? Many of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa were settled in early historical times by Bantu invaders who displaced or eradicated the indigenous Khoi-San peoples throughout much of Africa. Bantus eat Pygmies in the Kongo. Why is there no black guilt?
Who-whom Fjordman. Except their is no self interest among western nations to compensate for this. Westerners today believe they are evolving beyond history and arriving at a new realm of post everything. It is a tragedy of epic proportions. Not betrayal, not treason, but tragedy.
Perish the thought that our media, much less our own GOVERNMENT, would bother to recognize that Islam has declared war on the entire Civilized World. Instead, we are treated to the sordid spectacle of America's Commander in Chief proclaiming to our enemies, on their own soil no less, that "the United States is not and will never be at war with Islam".
In light of the fact that Islam is currently at war with The United States, BHO's only meaning can be that America intends to surrender.
This, along with nearly every effort (or lack thereof), being made by the MSM amounts to nothing less than treason.
Our enemy is killing us, civilians and soldiers alike, ON OUR OWN SOIL and no hue or cry is being raised. Yet listen to the liberal pack bay over a putative right wing militia killing an abortionist.
The murder of a Liberal pet abortionist outweighs the attempted multiple murders of our soldiers on American soil.
Any bets that the mosque where Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad attended will be pulled apart brick by brick for terrorist propaganda?
Any wagers that, FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME, the FBI and State Department will adamantly REFUSE to connect this incident with terrorism, Islam or anything remotely Muslim in nature?
THIS IS TREASON WRIT LARGE.
Fjordman: So why is there no yellow guilt?.
Yellow guilt would not serve the end of destroying White Civilization so it has no traction with liberals, communists or Islam, our current coterie of enemies.
Thanks for your kind words, Fjordman, and your erudtion that illuminates these issues. One of the reasons there is white guilt but no black or Aztec one is that the NKVD/KGB/Comintern invested 60 years and great funds between the 20s and the 80s into propagating and financing useful idiots only in the West. My next chapter at BJ will have something about that. HH’s mention of who-whom is trenchant in this context, particularly if voiced as the original kto kogo.
The idiot who posted on L. Auster’s site is beyond critique, but given his Chinese surname and U.S. West Coast location he can at least raise a chuckle with assertions such as “Whites are the only racial group, which continues to be settled largely outside of their historic borders.” No one has settled more widely outside of their “historic borders” than the Chinese.
Besides, if white Americans (or Australians etc.) return to Europe, where should the Europeans return? Surely, a big part of the population of France, the UK and even Ukraine should return to Norway. The Hungarians should return to Central Asia. The Vatican should vacate its real estate forthwith and return it to the Etruscans.
Yes, there is a great deal of tragedy in our rot, but a tragedy on such a scale is numbing. We should ridicule its fathomless idiocy.
"Or was the same chip implanted in their contemptible skulls sometime during college?"
For some reason I read the sentence above as "....was the same chimp implanted in their...skulls..."
I thought for a moment you had really stumbled on something........
Ciao Homophobic Horse,
Tragedy, I agree with you. The result of hubris, an excess of pride leading to ruin. More than treason, it's heresy. Values instead of virtues, rights instead of responsibilities, knowledge of the hollowest sort trumping basic morality.
There is a specter haunting Western Civilization.
Ah, the wingnut right's favorite word, shouted from the housetops.
TREASON!
If I were a newspaper editor I would put the death of Dr. Tiller and the outrage in Little Rock both on the front page. Because they are both the result of religious extremism run amok.
And I thought that Tayuan Seiyo's post was in the same vein, until I saw this statement:
the killing of a late-term abortionist who made a living at crushing and dismembering little humanswhich tells me that Tayuan Seiyo has at least some sympathy for Christian religious terrorism that he doesn't have for Muslim religious terrorism.
Shameful.
You lost me at "a late-term abortionist who made a living at crushing and dismembering little humans." That should read: "a late-term abortionist who served the public health by caring for women with health- and life-threatening pregnancies."
"Westerners today believe they are evolving beyond history and arriving at a new realm of post everything" - Well atleast post mortem
- And is the demography/jihad parallel in the two stories some kind of sick sign of the times?
I am officially getting paranoid,
I just don´t know what conspiracy theory to believe in?...
I think I will start with this one"Let whoever has ears listen.
Whoever is destined for captivity goes into captivity. Whoever is to be killed with a sword is to be killed with a sword. This indeed displays the endurance and belief of the faithful."
Nodrog: Ah, the wingnut right's favorite word, shouted from the housetops.
TREASON!.
So, having voted for the democratic party for nearly all of my adult life makes me a member of the "wingnut right"?
I can hear your putative intellect's tiny little transmission stripping its gears from over here.
Unlike the current epidemic of voluntary and preemptive self-censorship over Islam and its conjoined twin, terrorism; During World War II people showed concern for the well-being of America by limiting conduct that enabled our enemies or conceded any advantage to them.
This behavior goes by another much besmirched title, namely that of "Patriotism". I think it is fair to ask just how patriotic it is for a major newspapers to publicize the tracking of terrorist funding or large transfers of American fatalities from overseas conflicts.
Much of the MSM seems to have forgotten the old addage that:
JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO DO SOMETHING DOES NOT MAKE IT THE RIGHT THING TO DO.
Nodrog loves GoV.
"the killing of a late-term abortionist who made a living at crushing and dismembering little humanswhich tells me that Tayuan Seiyo has at least some sympathy for Christian religious terrorism that he doesn't have for Muslim religious terrorism.
Shameful."
I have read this a couple of times and cannot see any reason at all, why that should be shameful.
It is common sense to have more sympathy with militant anti-abortionists than jihadists...
The most disturbing thing is, the way you make it sound like a matter of "logic"... have the anti-eurocentric ideas you were force-fed at school, now become second nature?... rules of thought?
...Scary
"Tayuan Seiyo has at least some sympathy for Christian religious terrorism"
At the centre of that incident is the unresolved moral question of whether a fetus constitutes a tiny person or a ball of cells. It's easy to see why you must shoot someone engaged in killing toddlers, and so the Christian terrorist transposes that principle onto the abortionist. Unlike Quranic terrorism. Until there is a real answer, you can settle for the bad faith and bad security of the Leviathan to deal with "terrorists".
The media is run on Cowardice.
At least in relationship to Islam.
And Islam's extremely credible threats of violence.
The Mohammad Cartoon "controversy" demonstrated that.
Silence and craven blankness on their pages and on their airwaves was the general response.
The extremist murderer (of a doctor who preformed late term abortions) has no global advocacy group who are willing to back up any criticism of his act with terrorism and intimidation.
Criticism of Islam ~or one of its aspiring "martyrs"~ (like the extremist jihadist killer of the soldier in Arkansas) guarantees threats that have led to massacres, from 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7 to the Bali bombings and even the videotaped beheading of a prominent Wall Street Journal reporter... and very few in the MSM has the stomach or spine to face that level of pressure.
This is Cowardice, Treason's bastard baby brother.
No prettier a beast, and just as effective in undermining our Civilization.
Tiller was more than just your average abortion provider. And Late Term Partial Birth Abortions involve a lot more than scrapping a blob of goo off the uterin wall.
Dont be a mass murdrering Tiller of children.
Robin, come on -- you know the rules here.
Robin Shadowes said...
It's okay to spew hatred over christians/christianity but not of islam/muslims. That's how it works in MSM all over western Europe and now in America as well. You can expose killings of abortionists or pedophile priests all you want but anything negative about islam is a no-go zone. Both communism and islam is a totalitarian death cult, so it figures they have allied together. MSM is traitors big time and should all be put to trial. Unfortunately taht will never happen. The upcoming bloodbaths and holocausts will prevent that. A fair guess is that most of these traitors will succumb to the future horrors anyway. And I'm not sure how much of civilisation there will be left, once it is finally over, to hold trials at all. [Redacted]
Quoth GOK:
"Conservatives are trying to be nice and polite and present facts in a decent manner"
I'm sorry, but NO YOU ARE NOT. You are engaging in tribal-identification rituals designed to accentuate the distinction between "us" and "them". Your mental fact-checking is largely disabled for these things, so you don't recognize it. (You do recognize it when the left does it, but being unable to "see the beam in your own eye" makes your protests as utterly laughable to them as theirs are to you.)
Here's an example from Takuan Seiyo himself:
"... a late-term abortionist who made a living at crushing and dismembering little humans"
This is not polite and decent. This is rhetoric crafted to inflame. Further, it completely ignores the reality of medical crises and fetuses that could never survive. Here is a list of first-person stories from women who actually went to Tiller's clinic; this one is about a tragically malformed fetus that was doomed by spina bifida and severe hydrocephalus; the parents decided to spare him the pain he would inevitably experience should he have survived until birth (he would not have lived much longer). If you want someone to blame and picket, aim your wrath at God: he did the harm, and left suffering people to clean up the mess.
I don't mean to make this about abortion, this is about credibility and outreach. You are not credible if you exhibit hypocrisy, and words like this are nothing if not hypocritical. Your outreach on behalf of the anti-jihad will go for nothing if you look like you're on a jihad against people minding their own business, like doctors providing medically necessary services.
Imagine what the Jehova's Witnesses would look like if they picketed and bombed blood banks—that's you. And whatever it costs you to grit your teeth, you have to pick one mission or the other, because you are failing utterly at doing both. The front pages prove it.
I can understand abortion for some severe birth defects. I cannot understand abortion at nine months pregnancy, with no defects.
After all, with cheap easy pills, condom, the morning after pill, pregnancy is 100% preventable with that combination. Why then have an abortion at 9 months absent severe birth defects?
---------------------
As for why the Media is what it is, it is what it is because of it's gender base.
The audience/readership AND the staffing of the media is almost entirely female or female/gay dominated. This is as true of People as it is Men's Health, as true of CBS Evenning News with Katie Couric as it is with NPR.
The only exception is male-dominated AM Talk Radio, home of Hannity, Rush, Larry Elder, etc. who skew almost entirely male and older (my blog has some thoughts and data on this).
Basically, the political process is hard-left not because of the Comintern, or Gramscian Marxism, but because women are hard left. And women are hard left not because of conspiracy but the pill, condom, abortion, rising standards of living, and anonymous urban living allow women to be Hard-Left.
Because they don't need men.
MEN almost never buy the Gramscian line. The famous gender gap is prevalent in Wetern Europe as well as America. Educated Yuppie men wanting to curry favor with women will vote Hard Left, but other than that, none.
You can't sell ice cubes to Eskimos. Women adopted Hard Left stuff because it suited them fine: pushing down beta White men who are competitors, and bearers of unwanted sexual attention, fetishizing foreign men and their ways (Spike Lee's seminal essay called "Magical Negro" where the Will Smith, Cuba Gooding Jr, Morgan Freeman characters all exist solely to unblock spiritually challenged white protagonists) all clicks with that.
As does Multiculturalism, "racism" and White Guilt. White Guilt is nothing more than the loathing of White Women freed from any dependency on White Men, and able to express their distaste for them. Because for White Women, Muslim men are not a threat (see the Dutch Journalist who Wilders called out). No matter what the ACTION, the threat of competition, and unwanted sexual attention by beta "icky" White guys is the real enemy.
It's why women from Code Pink to the View, are the forefront of PC and Multiculturalism. And why Affirmative Action, government spending, and other stuff is all oriented towards women (and away from men). It's why women oppose the military and Law Enforcement (dominated by beta men) and want social work (dominated by women).
I reject Seiyo/Fjordman's thesis that a Gramscian Pod-people conspiracy took hold in the West. Instead, the inevitable fruits of anonymous urban living, rising incomes for women, and contraception cheap and reliable.
If leftists had not made our society into one where children are seen as mere optional accessories for women like a purse that they can buy or dispense with at will, then there would have been far fewer abortions.
In turn, the 50 million missing citizens would have obviated the need to import large numbers of foreign cultures many of which have no intention of assimilating but who come as colonists for Islam and Mexico.
As far as leftist media presenting a killer of babies (late term abortions occur on babies that are viable outside the womb) as a sympathetic victim while ignoring a young soldier's death on American soil at the hands of a domestic black jihadi, this is shameless on many counts.
The slain soldier's father in speaking of his son and the wounded soldier said words to the effect "they weren't on the battlefield. Apparently the battlefield is here". This should be engraved on every liberal's forehead.
Quoth laine:
"If leftists had not made our society into one where children are seen as mere optional accessories for women like a purse that they can buy or dispense with at will, then there would have been far fewer abortions."
Caricature. The culture has swung back, even among the left. Women LIKE and WANT babies. The problem is one you don't want to talk about: privatized costs, socialized benefits. The biggest culprit is not Roe v. Wade from 1972, it was the Social Security Act of 1935. With a stroke of Roosevelt's pen, one's comfort in retirement stopped being dependent upon one's contribution to the next generation of productive people, and became opposed to it.
"In turn, the 50 million missing citizens would have obviated the need to import large numbers of foreign cultures"
We fought WWII with a population of 150 million. We did not need all the immigrants we have taken, and most Americans do not want them. The transfer payments to low-income people (among whom low-skill immigrants are disproportionately represented) are another parasitic burden on people who would otherwise spend money on their own families.
Immigration is wildly unpopular except among ethnic activists and the US political elite. The only "need" for it comes from leftists importing voters and US Chamber of Commerce types importing cheap, pliant labor. And need I point out how low wages and insecure jobs promote abortion?
"As far as leftist media presenting a killer of babies (late term abortions occur on babies that are viable outside the womb) as a sympathetic victim"
YOU. ARE. DOING. IT. AGAIN. You did not even read the examples I linked to above, where heartbroken parents who WANTED children were dealt a crappy hand by nature/God (pick one) and forced to play it. Spina bifida and severe hydrocephalus - non-viable. Potter's Syndrome, leading to lack of amniotic fluid and failure of lungs to develop - non-viable. Massive congenital circulatory defects - if viable to birth, a short and miserable life in and out of surgery (mandated by law written by "pro-lifers" such as yourself, so the parents could not even request comfort care only).
You do this so you can maintain your position that "they" abort 30-week fetuses on a whim. It is all about demonizing "them" (a "they" who do not exist except as a bad caricature).
You should stop it. Stop it now. Stop it, because you destroy your credibility with the people who should be the most receptive audience for counter-jihad messages. Sure, Islamists are oppressive busybodies—but if there's little substantive difference between you and the Islamists on the major issues of interest to the middle, your credibility is ZERO. Reproductive rights, women's rights, gay rights, separation of church and state... from the middle, "social conservatives" and Islamists look different mostly in degree, not in kind. Worst, social conservatives are by far the biggest threat to these groups. Islamists cannot write law (yet), social conservatives can and do.
Let's take gay rights. Gays should be naturals for the counter-jihad, no? Pim Fortuyn had it right. But you can't attract them as allies if you demonize them. You should have a message of individual liberty under threat—but your own initiatives belie that, as you want to use the force of law to prevent people from doing anything you don't like. That's not liberty, that's another variety of forced conformity. You are the immediate threat to gays, so your counter-jihad message is utterly discredited. The same is true for women's rights, church-state separation, etc.
I doubt I can do anything to get you to change, but at least I can tell you about the alignment between your gun barrel and your foot before you pull the trigger again.
Engineer-Poet, so you've taken issue with the author's personal jab at the abortion doctor. This isn't enough to derail his overall statement, however. The author maintains the right to feel any way he wants about whomever he choses. Does it alienate some people? Yes, perhaps, and I see where you were going with that and agree. But in your words I see more than just a passing concern for whether or not his message is received by the right people. You obviously disagree with his emphasis, and so be it. I watch Pat Condell videos on YouTube all the time (Google him), and disagree emphatically with his in-your-face atheist approach. Not beause I care that he's an atheist (I myself am a proud agnostic), but because his more important message, that we are in mortal danger from Islam and creeping Sharia, will be lost on a huge cross section of people (holy rollers and the barely spiritual alike) before they really even hear his excellent analysis on Islam, political correctness, etc. Frankly, we can't afford to lose these people.
Okay, so Takuan Seiyo opposes abortion and has little regard (if we're to interpret the oft-quoted line from his article as you did) for the doctor(s) that perform them. You made an excellent point in suggesting that perhaps he could tone down his approach if (a big if) he wishes to impact a broader audience. Fine. You've said your peace, and I agree. But how about the meat of his statment? Does that concern you - or those like you - in any way whatsoever?
An abortion doctor was murdered by an ultra rightwing militia member and the story received coverage from every major media outlet in the country. An Army recruiter was murdered by a Muslim Jihadist and the media ignored it entirely. Any reference to the story at all painted the killer as troubled or angry in some way (the same pattern used in the wake of Fort Hood). Now, with Takuan Seiyo's story reduced to its bare necessities and no personal bias for or against abortion doctors, it would be nice if the article could be un-hijacked (six months after the fact) and returned to its proper place as a chilling reminder that the people who provide us with our information are not on our side.
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